The Coliseum

This project begins, approximately, at the flea market that takes place in the Oakland Coliseum and continues with visits to the Roman Colosseum, Venice Biennale, Documenta Athens, and happenings in Paris, Berlin, New York, Marfa and Los Angeles. Much of the project takes place in settings occasioned for Art purposes. The project exists in a period of precarity and privilege; tenuous freelance work, unstable housing, displacement, credit cards and cheap air travel. There are personal themes of parenting, romance and complex relationships to the implicated technologies. Through this self-reflexive, and public digital identity construction something like a working revelation concerning the ways one might escape the onanistic tendencies of these platforms is being apprenticed. This multiplicity of image and text charts a navigation through passing dispositions, inquiries, amplifications and affirmations. The boundaries between this project, art and identity are blurry. We’re seeking, in a very expanded sense, to integrate an evolving version of self into a larger web of coexistence.

The project was documented over a year on instagram and exists as an archive of images and writing. A PDF version is available here (500mb, 700 pages)

An installation version was realized at Cuesta College in 2018 and included images of Chumash petroglyphs from the Carrizo Plain.

A working version of an edited down version is available here at web resolution

....the image itself, impoverished of resolution, impressed with it’s limitations, it’s failures, it’s VoIP glitches, creates an artifact of our fleeting correspondence. A register of that aimed gesture of love, our effort to bridge the space between us. She is coming down from the sky, from a constellation of satellites, to a small device that may as well have replaced whatever codex we used to look towards for guidance...

...a screenshot of a photo of teenagers at The Colosseum being analyzed by facebook’s facial recognition software...

Spring is not a time for austerity

...a woman sweeping in a dollar store, pausing to examine a synthetic flower under the coursing nighttime fluorescents...

Something has changed in me and I think it may have some thing to do with the braided wild Armenian mountain sorrel. Remember in El Paso not far from where satellite maps told us Helen of Troy intersects with Corona del Sol? The etymology of Helen’s name continues to be a problem for scholars. Some have connected this etymology to a hypothetical proto-indo-european sun goddess, noting her name’s connection to the word for “sun” in various indo-european cultures.[7][8][9][10][b]. We found respite in a taqueria behind a mercado in the segundo barrio, that second Ellis island on the rio grande. The room was cold and plastic and the owner gave us the streaming internet television remote. We took turns in the bathroom and put on a nature documentary about bears. The petrochemicals, dirty fry oil and comfort we felt in each other. Sitting close on the same side of the table, the bears buffering in the snow and then in the spring bloom. One day we might talk about that day on Chevy Chase boulevard in little Armenia where I wore your furry coat, looked a little llama like and Sherpa’d your instruments to the rent-a-car.

Quipu stories, a young Nigerian artist, a dark indoor amphitheater with real time LED stock market prices and haunting Greek choruses, military grade sound canons shooting stories from below, instruments made with objects from a refugee camp, photos of how the oppressed internalize their oppression in occupied Palestine, a displaced tent cast in marble looking at the Acropolis, a Thai revolutionary libretto, a prolific sleep talker, a revived synthesizer, a failed musical language, shimmering voodoo paintings, 3D printed gender ambiguous forms, colorful Pakistani weddings tents in a square filled with birds where they serve free lunch every day, a symposium on capital, a tribute to Graciela Paraskevaídis, an archive of Biafra, a school of gesture, a dancer stripping off layers and their meanings, woven constellations, ineffable books, simple sketches, murdered children, banned western decadent art, poultry farm work camps, vacuum sealed refugee sculptures, glitching Nina Simone wind, hermaphrodite hormone therapy, daytime talk shows, Gauguin's gaze in today's Tahiti, all the things she knows but can't stop thinking about, a drawing table sculpture for a Jane Bowles passage with a sepulchral and mid century modern inflection, dried ngalama leaves being prepared for the dye pot, a razed forest, dancing bodies, a room full of masks, a home screen screenshot, a recurrent set of ground rules performed in different institutional settings, an archive on sugar plantations, the many headed hydra, untitled dark sky mezzotints